


No Mountain High, No Valley Low

by lyricalnights



Category: Now and Then (1995)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:19:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricalnights/pseuds/lyricalnights





	No Mountain High, No Valley Low

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yvi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yvi/gifts).



Seconds  
Teeny lived for the first few seconds on the Red Carpet. Sure, there were a lot of up sides to becoming the famous movie star she always knew she would be. She genuinely loved to act, loved to lose herself inside a new character and become a different person- hooker or banker, secretary or spunky private detective. She enjoyed the money, money that she had earned instead of pulling it out of an endless series of generic "love you!" birthday cards from her parents. She even loved the press and their constant game of catch-me-if-you-can; being pursued by a guy on a Kawasaki with a telephoto made her somebody worth noticing. But her very favorite thing was to step out of a limo, to slide across the seat smooth like glass and emerge into the spark and flare of million flashbulbs going off at once. Part of it was the joy of being wanted and adored, not ignored, not overlooked. Teeny knew better, though, than to be completely seduced by this temporary high, and so every time she made her entrance and saw artificial stars dancing across her vision, she thought of Sam and their nights out watching the real stars streak across the sky. She thought of Sam, and Roberta and Chrissy, and her feet stayed firmly in her Christian Louboutins, and she stayed Teeny in her heart no matter how many people called for "Tina, Tina!"

Minutes  
The one thing Sam always felt she owed to her father was her ability to travel light. She was famous (at least in her own circle) for being able to pack her bags and go at a minute's notice. She privately thought of this as her own secret superpower, and made a point of mentioning it to any boyfriend who started giving her domestic looks and suggesting that she could leave some things in this drawer here if she wanted. Lean and mean, that was the Sam Albertson way. She followed her inspiration (definitely did not run from her demons) across the country and around the world, working odd jobs and teaching English with her passport in one hand and her notebook in the other. A stranger in strange lands indeed. She sent the girls postcards from each destination, "wish you were here- ha ha" scrawled near the bottom of each, betraying her heart in the way her brain rarely allowed. Sometimes she would get up in the middle of the night, barely awake, and feel around for her notebook, carry it over to a window with a streetlight shining through. On these nights, she would reach into the pocket in the back and pull out a battered photograph, trace each smiling face as though she could etch them into her fingertips. Just for a minute, she would think about executing an about-face, turning homeward. Then she would tuck the photo away, look around for her bag, just to check, and return to sleep.

Hours  
It's almost two hours exactly from Shelby to Bloomington, Indiana. Roberta never thought it felt like that much when she made her occasional trips to the big city, once to bring her second oldest brother home when his car had broken down and a couple of times for softball matches the year they had won the state championship. She first discovered the tricky tendency of distance to be longer than actual mileage when she watched Scott drive away in his battered Chevy with all his stuff packed into the backseat. He had asked if she wanted to come, though she had no way of getting home again, but she just shook her head and kissed him, then punched him in the arm and told him not to think she would miss him or anything. The distance stretched again the following autumn, when she in turn packed up the Chevy, fighting Scott's guitar for space to put her cleats in. This time it was Chrissy watching forlornly, Sam and Teeny having made tracks out of town as soon as the ink was dry on their diplomas. Breaking the sniffly silence and her longstanding rule against gooey sentiment, she hugged Chrissy fiercely and promised to call the next weekend, no matter what. As Scott drove away, she jammed herself halfway out of the window, blowing a kiss with one hand and shooting a bird with the other. Despite her outraged eyebrows, Roberta was pretty sure Chrissy was smiling a little as they turned the corner.

Days  
Though she would never admit it to Sam and Teeny, it hadn't exactly been Chrissy's plan to spend her adult days in the same house where she had spent her childhood. After she and Morton married, they rented a house with two bedrooms (just in case...) but the linoleum was cracked and the paint peeled, and it wasn't the kind of place Chrissy pictured raising their kids. Morton had just applied to the bank so they could buy when Chrissy's mother sat her down at the kitchen table over coffee and explained in her halting, roundabout way that that she was dying, that the cancer had spread before she'd even known about it. The end came quickly and by then Chrissy was with her mother all the time, stroking her hair and doing what she could, a pathetic little. In turn, Roberta held her and stroked her own hair without trying to stop Chrissy's wrenching sobs. Roberta asked if she should call Sam and Teeny, but Chrissy needed to hold this between them, this shared pain. Instead she nodded graciously as people stopped her on the street and patted her hand, then went home to the rented house and stared at the faded walls. When her father offered to sell them the house so he could move to Boca, she just looked at Morton, who said yes for the both of them. She had never loved him more. She supposed many people might find this creepy, but some days she would stop and take a breath, feeling like her mother was right over her shoulder.

Weeks  
Roberta found it amusing the way pregnant women were obsessed by weeks. How many weeks down? How many to go? She always fought the urge to say "as many as it takes," because the one thing that you never wanted to do was rile a woman who couldn't identify her shoe color by looking downward. You could lose an eye that way. Instead she answered in her calm doctor voice, the one that promised that everything would be okay, because Dr. Martin said so. It amazed her how well that voice worked, and she sometimes wondered where it had come from. Surely she would have noticed if it were issued with the degree and the stethoscope. Her brothers had laughed a little when she had announced over a Thanksgiving dinner that she planned to go to med school, and then deliver babies. Well, they laughed at anything and would have found it equally hilarious if she told them she planned to learn fire-eating and join the circus. Scott hadn't laughed, though, and neither had her father. They weren't very much alike, these two men, but they were both familiar with the set of her jaw and the steel of her conviction, and they both knew how much she needed to hold life to her heart. She needed to touch it, to grasp it with both hands and pull it into the light. When her father said "she gets that from her mother," Scott nodded. They meant it in different ways, but both were equally true.

Months  
Chrissy gardened because she found it absorbing, no matter what deeper psychological meaning Sam tried to attach to it and use to torture her. Not that the hose didn't water the garden around here just fine, thank you very much. She loved the feeling of dirt on her hands, ever so subversive, and the sense of accomplishment she felt when the flowers flourished under her watchful eyes. She planned carefully each year, selecting the right things to plant next to each other, and the right time to begin as the earth thawed from the icy cold. Now it was early summer, and Chrissy was rushing to get her garden just so before she grew too large to bend down and examine a new bloom or tweak a dead blossom from its stalk. Morton tried to help, such a dear, but he didn't know a petunia from a peony. He could mow the lawn like a pro but was a positive menace with a weed whacker. Chrissy leaned back, supporting her expanding belly with her hands, and surveyed her little kingdom. Patience was what you needed to grow a garden, month after month of patience and loving care. She looked down and smiled; all of the best projects were worth putting in a little bit of time. Maybe she would plant some pretty flowers under the nursery window, to look at while they sat and rocked in the chair Morton had surprised her with on Mother's Day.

Years  
Beginning in late November, Teeny's massive living room filled with an astonishing variety of flowers, chocolates, silk neckties and cigars. She always counted on this time of year to let her know how her career was going. It was a definite fact that the more famous you were, the more people you had to give thoughtfully chosen Christmas presents to. Managers and agents, personal stylists and lawn care engineers. Teeny felt there was a secret language buried in there that she could decode if only she had the right key. Thankfully, she saved the very best present (an all-expenses-paid trip New Year's trip to Hawaii) for her assistant Stacy, and turned the whole mess over to her. She never knew what magic Stacy possessed to turn these massive piles of stuff into elegantly wrapped packages waiting in ranks for the delivery man, but she admired it very much. Teeny herself wrapped only a handful of gifts each year, sending love and goodies back to Shelby for Roberta and Chrissy, and forwarding the same on to Sam where ever she was seeking her inspiration this time. The very last part of her ritual, which Stacy always wondered over but never asked about, was a simple Christmas card that she tucked a bit of money into and addressed simply "To Pete, From a Friend," before sealing it inside a letter to the postmaster of her home town. The year Teeny didn't send that card, Stacy thought she saw tears in her eyes; she didn't ask.

Decades  
She hadn't planned this decade of relative estrangement, Sam swore. It wasn't something she had written down on a pad of paper and stuck to the refrigerator door: "get milk, pay electric bill, avoid hometown for ten years." It had just happened, like a crack you avoided on the sidewalk every day until you forgot all about the crack itself and only sidestepped out of muscle memory. The last time she had been back was for Angela's college graduation, and she had barely recognized her squirty little sister in the poised sorority sister and magna cum laude business major standing before her. Their mother had been escorted by her third husband the real estate developer. Bud had turned up as well, grinning proudly about his smart girl, and hadn't he always said she had brains coming out her ears. Sam couldn't even manage a grimace of annoyance at the poor guy by this point, even if he did have Don Johnson hair and wicker shoes. Her father sent Angela his apologies and a hundred dollar bill; Sam tried not to be annoyed that at least he'd noticed her sister's graduation. Soon after this, an editor at Ace Books picked her latest manuscript out of the slush pile, and then her second novel was nominated for a Hugo. She wrote, and she taught composition classes to put food on the table. Her third book netted a few radio interviews, but Aliens Next Door made her the science fiction version of a rock star. When she got Chrissy's phone call, she looked in the mirror and was startled by the person she saw, half-expecting her twelve year old face to be peering back at her.

Lifetimes  
Chrissy didn't know if the pact would really work this time the way it had before. There is a magic in a child's promise that is often forgotten in an adult's easy assurances. Lives rushed onward; people got busy, or bored, or distracted. But she chose to be hopeful, and she named her daughter Hope, her wish whispered daily where few people hearing it would understand. Maybe she had sat in the treehouse with her dearest friends for the last time, but she didn't think so. She intended to climb that ladder with Roberta, Teeny, and Sam until they were all so old and grey they couldn't make it anymore. In the meantime, it would only be a few years until Hope was big enough to enjoy the treehouse herself, maybe with her best friends in the world if she were lucky. Chrissy bounced the baby gently on her hip and smiled; a lifetime to look forward to.


End file.
